Nonsense. In 1988..90 I assisted on a spreadsheet that managed the transfer pricing for a multinational firm, 18 operating entities in 15 countries, that cumulatively had ~US$1.4B in Sales. A team of 12 in Corporate did the care and feeding of the beast. Re-Calc times were on the order of 40 minutes. In Engineering, we had dozen of large Spreadsheets: Theoretical MTBF calculations, Budgets for multi-million USD$ Departments & Projects, etc. Cumulatively 100's of people at this one business used many large/complex spreadsheets. By 1990 we even had pivot tables! We were nothing special--most of our competitors likely did the same or better.

Reamde: A Novel. {a.k.a.: Don't encrypt the hard drive of an Accountant managing the Russian MAFIA's pension fund.}

Ditto... I also performed this experiment, (using the 31" Cassegrain), as an Undergraduate in the mid-80's.
[Rosemary Hill Observatory, Bronson, FL, UF]

So, I expect that this has been a relatively common experiment in many Departments for at least the past half-century+!

Directory Opus. Five major releases on the Amiga; now at release 10.x on Windows.

If you have to use a PC running Microsoft Windows; it is at least nice to have the Linus blanket of a *working*, highly multi-threaded, File Manager written by a competent programmer!

I'm sorry, I realize that somebody spent a lot of effort and thought they were doing something really cool; however I have to give the mobile site a "fail".

Its page loading and scrolling performance is not acceptable in any of the Browsers on my dual-core phone: Opera, Dolphin, FireFox, Chrome--it feels high-latency: bloated and clunky. [...sort of like the type of user interaction expectations I would have from a Word Processor written in VisualAda.NET!]

Sigh,

New COKE, New Slashdot--back to "Classic".

Basically non-functional on either my phone or the Android Tablet I am current developing on:

Android 2.3 & 4.0 w/ current Opera for Android.

This is a rough crowd--would be nice if a "Mobile Site" would work with a pair of pretty vanilla "Mobile Devices".

Maybe Slashdot needs a QA department?

Oh Yea? Think again Buckwheat! I've got a little "zoo" of well over 20 unique Boot Sector Virii for the C=64. I have well over a a hundred virus variants for the Amiga... [then again--I was a Production Engineer at Commodore responsible for the Duplication Masters] If ever you get too smug with your Mosaic/Voyager Browser on a network segment that I control--you will see GURU Meditation so fast the the capacitors in your Monitor will POP! As for GEOS--got the source code. I'm sure there is something "interesting" that could be exploited at 2400 baud... [anybody got a simulation of Quantum Link running???] Now, VMS 3.5, there was a "virus proof" OS... No wait--3 of the 5 machines on my cluster got the Morris Worm--Sigh!

Given that my significant other is moving in with me, some "adjustments" have been made to my single-Engineer lifestyle.. This past week I delivered unto the philistine clutches of the local Electronics Recycler: Six Amiga 1200 Computers; [14 MHz MC68EC020/2MB/120MB EIDE HDD] Four Amiga 3000 Computers; [16 and 25 MHz MC68030/18MB/105 to 400 MB SCSI HDD's] Two Amiga 4000 Computers; [25 MHz MC68040/18MB/250MB SCSI HDD's] Five Amiga 4000T PCBA's; Two VideoToasters; 1 Moniterm Monitor; 40 SCSI HDD's; [of various generations--including an originally USD$4000 Maxtor "Magic" 1.2GB] 10 UHD-FDD's; [1.76MB 3.5"] Two DC250 SCSI Tape Drives; [and about 100 Tapes--incl. the contents of every Amiga Pirate BBS in USA circa 1992] One Irwin FDD-interface tape drive; [another dozen or so tapes] One Microtek 4800dpi SCSI Flat-bed Scanner; About a dozen PC Motherboards--VLB, PCI, and expansion boards--a bunch of Adaptec SCI host adapters going back to ISA; Three Northgate Omni-Ultra Keyboards; A box of "Cherry" ERGO Keyboards; a couple of EGA Monitors; and about 20 tubes of 4Mbit Flash Memory that I paid USD$70/pc for!!! The Commodore SX64 stays! What's left? Mostly Engineering documentation--Schematics, BOM's, Service Manuals--and plus a couple of functioning CDTV's, an A1000 and a A2500HD... [and the video game collection from hell...I've got any GameStop seriously beat!] Sigh.

Actually--have you had a look a the the total mess that is the Audio Mixer since Vista? That was not implemented "in the best interests of the Customer"... Blah.

Its not quite true. As with fungus reducing tree trunks in the forest--Patent Trolls have a place in the Business Ecosystem--they create a market for the IP property of the fallen. This makes the effective "Price of Failure" a non-zero sum. This makes Banks, Bridge-Loan-Specialists, etc. willing to loan to High-Tech Start-ups that are one the ropes. There will be a market, admittedly small, market for the un-marketable. For those of us who have gone from Start-up to Start-up--even mushrooms are a source of nutrition!!!